If you think Africa is a model for freedom and prosperity – go ahead and re-elect Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s Democratic Congress. Do it ’cause, Baby, you ain’t seen nut’in yet!

The MacMillan dictionary defines tribalism as a) “a way of thinking or behaving in which people are more loyal to their tribe than to their friends, their country, or any other social group,” and b) “very strong loyalty that someone feels for the group they belong to, usually combined with the feeling of disliking all other groups or being different from them.”

The Point newspaper (“The menace of tribalism”) in Gambia, Africa, was a bit more blunt on Jan. 25, 2010: “The negative effects of tribalism permeate all African countries. Millions have been killed, maimed or displaced in civil wars in sub-Sahara Africa over the past 50 years, mostly because of tribal agitation. Most of us are living witnesses to the carnage that occurred in Rwanda and is still going on in Somalia. These countries have fallen into the abyss mainly because of tribalism.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this for most Americans has been that the perpetrators of the new American tribalism have been the political left. This “we are the world” crowd who had “moved beyond” nationalism and borders have become the most vehement practitioners of the politics of exclusion and self-imagined superiority. Competing voices on how to solve America’s growing list of critical problems are not only to be ignored – they are to be silenced! “Pass the bill to learn what’s in it!”

Owning the nation’s corrupt media is not enough for the new American tribalists – no other views can even be discussed! Loyalty to the tribe, and the nepotism and spoils that come with it, demands total and complete allegiance to the tribal agenda. Speak ill of your own tribe and you will rapidly become an outcast, someone who must work and produce for a living, instead of a leech sucking the nation’s blood and productivity dry.

In dollar terms the corruption, greed, tribal nepotism and lawlessness are unprecedented in American history. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on tracking and surveillance technology to keep American citizens in line and bare every facet of their existence to a government gone mad. All the while, illegal aliens cross our borders at will, terrorize our populace, game our welfare system and claim medical care and citizenship for their offspring. Black-on-white voter intimidation goes unpunished, while the PC-rotted brains of government officials term an Islamist massacre at Fort Hood “workplace violence.”

“The practice of treating the results of tribalism while virtually denying its existence, is largely responsible for the poor outcomes of the development efforts and for persistent poverty in Africa. A few examples should suffice: the Nigerian Civil War killed over a million. In Rwanda/Burundi some 800,000 lives were lost. Recently over 1,000 died and about 300,000 were displaced in Kenya. Thousands have died and millions have been displaced in Zimbabwe where a once thriving economy has been destroyed. The state of Somalia has all but disintegrated. One could go on – Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia to name a few. The purpose of this note is to sound a much needed alarm that unless tribalism is confronted, continuing to throw resources at the problem such as is proposed by the Commission on Africa and others, will result in further failure to improve the living standards of Africans. They deserve better.”